Terri Apter Ph.Dhttp://terriapter.com
Psychologist, Writer and Senior Tutor at Newnham College, CambridgeTue, 24 Apr 2018 09:53:03 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.3Revealing the Hidden Pain of Family Estrangementhttp://terriapter.com/2017/12/19/revealing-the-hidden-pain-of-family-estrangement/
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 12:06:34 +0000http://terriapter.com/?p=84Read More]]>Estrangement from family is among the most painful human experiences. We are born into a close family tie, and our continued inclusion is literally a matter of life and death. Without an adult’s attention, care and love, we cannot survive infancy. This basic need does not go away, even we are able to look after ourselves. Instead, that early dependence grows into an emotional attachment that makes us feel, even as grown ups, that our lives depend on connection to the people we love.

A new report has just been published that explores the hidden tragedy whereby a fundamental attachment has been severed, a bloodline version of divorce that leaves phantom limbs. “I no longer speak to my mum,” thirty-four year old Joe tells me, “I don’t take her calls, either. But every day I hear her voice inside my head, and everyday I ask myself whether I’m doing the right thing, for me. Over and over again scenarios play in my mind. I picture us coming back together, but as that reel plays on, I hit the wall of her anger and criticism. But I never make peace with the separation.”

As one person quoted in the report says: “I wish I had a mother that loved me and wanted the best for me”.

Hidden Voices: Family Estrangement in Adulthood, published earlier this month, is the result of a collaboration between the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge and Stand Alone, a charity that offers support to adults who are estranged from their family. Over 800 adults, ranging in age from 18 to over 60, contributed to the research by revealing personal experiences of family estrangement, either from their entire family, or a key member such as a parent or adult child.

reviously, they may have suffered in silence, humiliated and shamed by rejection, some even thinking that other people avoid them because of their family problems. So little understood is estrangement pain, that one in four participants who sought help from a GP, for example, did not feel they received appropriate support, and some complained that social services were “useless” while the clergy’s urge to be forgiving was wide of the mark. Here they speak of the common triggers that spike even dormant estrangement pain.

Being around another family can highlight one’s own exclusion. Birthdays can chill with the reminder that people who would normally delight in the simple fact that we exist, have cut us out of their life; but the most common trigger of estrangement pain is the holiday season which 9 out of 10 people who suffer family estrangement find “challenging”.

Christmas, the quintessential time of family gathering, gift-giving, communal hopefulness, gratitude and celebration, becomes a hollow-eyed reminder of continuing emotional loss.

Family ties are fundamental to our emotional and psychological make-up. Why would anyone shun one of their own? One imagines the extreme cruelties of physical or sexual abuse – and indeed, these are reasons people in the study sometimes gave for instigating estrangement. But there are other reasons, too, less extreme and very common, such as mismatched expectations about family roles and obligations, about the meaning and expression of the family relationship.

In writing about adult sons and daughters who faced dilemmas in their relationships with a parent, about 20% said that the relationship constantly seemed at risk, that what I call a difficult parent is experienced by the daughter or son as being at the cusp of rejecting the child, or casting them out as a result of disapproval, disgust or disappointment. When a daughter or son made the difficult decision to sever the relationship, it was usually because they felt that maintaining it was too emotionally costly, that they had to distort their very soul into shapes that did not feel right to them in order to please or pacify a parent.

The results of the Hidden Lives survey suggest, however, that most estrangements were instigated not by a disapproving parent but by a son or daughter, and not in the heat of irritable adolescence, but between the ages of 24 and 35. From my own research I hypothesize that estrangement is instigated only after years of attempts to achieve approval and comfort, and that the adult child felt that a deep estrangement lay at the heart of the relationship, that any apparent harmony or affection was based on showing a false self to the parent.

While family estrangement is sometimes temporary, an adult child who instigates estrangement is likely to believe that a functional relationship with a parent – a relationship that does not involve pain and humiliation, or bring with it a sense of betrayal – will never be possible. Hidden Voices reminds us of the high cost of estrangement pain, and the extent of the tragedy that impacts on the wellbeing of everyone involved, whoever instigated the rupture. The fractured family members long for things to be better, even just a little better, enough to stem what feels like an ever-increasing tide of loss, never a scar always an open wound. As one participant put it, simply but with the clarity of a ringing bell: “I miss my family very much”.

So what can we do to help someone in this position? People said that “having someone listen” to them, “being seen as normal”, being told that they were “an okay person”, and hearing that others had similar experiences can ease the pain.

]]>What Parents Need to Know About Talking to Teenshttp://terriapter.com/2017/12/19/what-parents-need-to-know-about-talking-to-teens/
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 12:03:12 +0000http://terriapter.com/?p=81Read More]]>Vicky and her daughter Alex are chatting about Alex’s friend, Amber, when Vicky says, “She sounds like trouble.” Thunderclouds cross the teen’s face. “You are so annoying!” the 14-year-old proclaims. Vicky is torn between the wish to comfort her daughter and outrage: “Why are you so upset? What have I done? I was agreeing with you!”

“All I have to do is take one step too close to her and she growls like a lion,” Pam says of her 13-year-old daughter Margot. “She complains that I am ‘in her space’ if I stand behind her to see what she is doing on her tablet. She wriggles her shoulders, even if I don’t touch her. She once burst into tears because the way I was drinking my coffee was annoying her so much she couldn’t bear it.”

When Pamina tells her 14-year-old daughter, “You look gorgeous,” Aisha hisses, “You are just stupid!” When her mother, visibly hurt, leaves the room, Aisha takes deep breaths, fighting her own frustration. She explains to me, “How can she praise me when she doesn’t know who I really am?”

When we know a person very well, her presence is enough to call up a host of feelings. This is why the company of someone we love is so pleasurable, and why their touch has the magic to reduce anxiety and even physical pain. It also explains why the presence of someone we dislike makes our skin crawl. The deep emotional and physical history of mother and child leaves a powerful legacy. In adolescence the history of past comfort and intimacy gives way to very mixed feelings. Teens feel trapped both by the comfort they are likely to feel in a mother’s presence, and by their wish to expel the dependence of their previous child-self. The echoes of comfort are therefore confusing, out of keeping with the teen’s fragile, wishful sense of self.

That ferocious teenage irritability also serves a purpose. Part of the teen’s job – in the teen’s view – is to shake a mother out of the tired old habit of seeing the teenager as the child the mother think’s she knows. Sudden, nearly inexplicable outbursts powerfully communicate some inner upheaval, and grab a parent’s attention. This attention is often angry and hurt, but it is also likely to shape a question, “What is going on with you?” Of course the teen may not know the answer herself, but there is some satisfaction in seeing a parent’s resonate with her own confusion.

Such outbursts also contain an underlying criticism of a mother’s response, and a desire to correct it: Alex was opening up to her mother about friend-trouble, but her mother’s response seemed too final, too “judgmental” – it lacked the precise tenor Alex wanted at that moment. Margot does not want her mother’s oversight of her internet activity, and Aisha is trying to undercut her mother’s ability to judge her at all: even praise can offend a teen who wants to engage the parent in challenge rather than straightforward approval.

Arguments between parents and teens are part of the repertoire of negotiation: teens embark on quarrels to remind a parent how much they have changed, and to flag that they now have different needs from a parent. But though parent/teen arguments can re-vitalize the relationship, they carry the risk of generating more anger, and more misunderstanding. The teen’s behavior can be frightening and hurtful. “Does my teen hate me?” or, “Is this rejection?” or, “Is this rebellion?” or even, “Is this the death of the parent’s power to protect and guide her son or daughter?” many parents wonder.

Some parents make a frantic bid to regain control. This is likely to be counterproductive. “You’d better do as I say!” humiliates a teen; it calls up the very awe and dependence that she is trying to overcome. Some parents show how hurt or anxious they are, and the teen then is likely to feel anxious herself, or perhaps feel shame at being such a cause of concern. So are there any life rafts in these troubled waters?

In the decades I have spent observing teens and their parents, I have found that understanding the point and purpose of these quarrels often prevents the arguments from spiraling downward. A teen is not trying to push a parent away, but to re-engage her with a better balance. Teens continue to need and love and value their parents enormously, but the high standards they have for a parent’s understanding and appreciation often seems like rejection.

Often they cannot say what it is they want, but what they don’t want strikes at their core. They lash out in the hope that next time a parent’s response will be just a little closer to the mark.

]]>Are We Missing the Point when it Comes to Anorexia?http://terriapter.com/2017/12/19/are-we-missing-the-point-when-it-comes-to-anorexia/
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 11:39:39 +0000http://terriapter.com/?p=78Read More]]>Anorexia nervosa is a hot topic in two senses: it is a subject of high-profile discussion and it is emotionally charged. Recent remarks by Dame Joan Bakewell have fuelled the fire; the meanings of her moderate words (anorexia “could be about…narcissism really” arising from preoccupation with “being beautiful and healthy [sic!] and thin”) have sparked idiosyncratic interpretations that generate argument but evade logic.

One unexamined assumption in the ensuing furore, for example, is that anorexia nervosa is a recent epidemic spread on the wings of social media, particularly the selfie-culture. A search of online PsychINFO and Medline/Pubmed databases, however, reveals no evidence for the underlying assumption that anorexia is increasing.

An awful, disturbing expansion of the condition occurred throughout the last century, but since 1985 – before “selfie” was a word, before Facebook was a common feature of young people’s lives, before iPhones – the overall incidence has remained stable. This is not a reason to be sanguine. Anorexia nervosa affects 1 in 150 adolescents, the large majority of whom are female. It involves severe, self-inflicted weight loss and has a higher mortality rate than any other mental disorder.

The causes are complex, often interwoven with anxiety, depression and other types of self-harm. Yet many people – layman parent, journalist, medical professional – are confident they know “the cause”. When I first began my research on teenagers, mother-blame was in fashion. An anorexic girl, it was thought, would have a mother who is unresponsive to her child’s (usually a daughter’s) own needs. Hence the girl feels ashamed of her desires and appetites; she starves herself to deny their existence.

More recently the focus has shifted from mother to media: size 0, air-brushed models have come to the fore; the advertising industry and “media culture” in general are seen to foster an ideal physique that can be met only when normal healthy development is thwarted via starvation. Distorted physical ideals affect everyone, but teenage girls seem particularly sensitive to them. A special sensitivity to pleasing others puts them at risk of all kinds of self-sacrifice.

When Joan Jacobs Blumberg looked at girls’ diaries across the past hundred years, she found a shift from “being good” to “looking good” as moral worth became equated with physical appearance. While neuroscience has entered the law courts and the education system, it remains in the margins of discussions about anorexia; but new brain imaging techniques suggest profound functional disturbance in ways someone in the grip of anorexia perceives herself; even if she manages to attain a healthy weight, blood flow to brain areas associated with self-perception remain reduced. Hence parents often describe a dizzying chasm lodged between them and the daughter whom they try reason with and reassure.

One reason anorexia raises such alarm in parents is that the mindset in which it develops is far more prevalent than the condition itself. Body dissatisfaction seems to kick in at an early age (and the most pronounced epidemiological change in anorexia has been the age of onset: overall the incidence has not increased but girls become susceptible to it at an increasingly younger age). A few years ago I participated in an exercise whereby three groups of girls – one aged six, one aged nine, one aged twelve, and all of normal weight – were asked to select their ideal body image from a series of digitally altered pictures at 5% increments. Half of the six year olds wanted to be three sizes smaller than they actually were; already they saw the slimmest option as the best one. But I also discovered that they eagerly engaged with attempts to resist the skinny ideal. When we all sat together, discussing who was slender and attractive, and who would be a good friend, they absorbed talk that shifted the perspective from “looking good” to “being interesting”.

Tell girls a story about a person’s feelings and goals and challenges and achievements, and their focus on the body perfect dissolves into a fascinated empathy with who a person really is. While a teen might resist such coaching (after all, the teen “knows everything and we know nothing”) very young girls delight in the intimacy of wise conversations. In all the debate about a self-absorbed or narcissistic society there is little research on pragmatic prevention or critical periods of development or windows of opportunity. What I realised as I observed those six-year-old girls participating in the exercise was that we who complain about the culture of “looks” have more power than we may suppose to change the micro-culture of young people close to us.

]]>Why We Need International Women’s Dayhttp://terriapter.com/2017/12/19/why-we-need-international-womens-day/
Tue, 19 Dec 2017 11:31:33 +0000http://terriapter.com/?p=75Read More]]>Explanations of women’s under-representation in science, technology, engineering and maths (only 14% of women entering University choose science related subjects, compared to 39% of boys) are usually stacked up like layers on a wedding cake.

The bottom layer, the stodgy foundation, is about “hard wiring”. Fortunately, claiming that gender career segregation is down to differences in women’s and men’s brains is now high risk; though this claim has helped launch one Cambridge professor as a star, it has also brought down one Harvard president.

The middle layer consists of a mixture of biases: overt misogyny and control (good women are not ambitious, they behave and think only as their male relatives dictate), unconscious bias (parents are more likely to expect a son to be successful in science, even when a daughter is better at maths; a c.v. is rated higher when it is thought to be for a man than when it is said to be for a woman); and implicit bias, which is like a cancerous cultural limpet, dragging our thought processes into stereotype format, even when we think we know better.

The top layer, swirled with pretty icing, addresses girls’ and women’s psychology: it is they, after all, who make the choices. The prevalent new flavour is confidence: girls opt for different subjects and follow different careers, it is said, because they lack confidence.

I have heard this so often that the pace and intonation of the word – with emphasis on the first syllable and a prolonged plummy vowel sound, closing with a despairing sign – fills my mind like a simplistic balloon that I would love to pop; but when I attack it, it just morphs into a new shape. This is what I felt when listening to the briefing for the OECD report on gender ahead of International Women’s Day.

Not that the report is not thoughtful and intelligent and politically correct: it is all these things. The report asserts that there are no natural born differences in ability between girls and boys (“aptitude has no gender” is the press-friendly phrase), but boys are nonetheless more confident about their abilities and less anxious about their performance, so they go for gold and the girls play safe.

The real sweet in the OECD report is that the “social and emotional issues” in play can be fairly easily and inexpensively corrected with a concerted effort from parents and teachers.

“Parents can give their sons and daughters equal encouragement”, and “teachers can help by becoming more aware of their biases”. There is nothing wrong with this diagnosis or these proposals other than their insufficiencies and omission of what growing up is like on the ground.

Girls are not passive recipients of stereotypes and mixed messages. They engage with female norms, trying them on for size, ripping them apart, and reconfiguring them. Whether in glorious friendship talk or in hellish family quarrels, they puzzle over the contradictions of a dirty, gendered culture. Much of their teenage irritability expresses frustration in a world that has not yet learned their real physical or cognitive shape.

Many parents do encourage daughters to succeed in science, and many girls aim high; but this is not in a vacuum. When women are asked to record their sex at the beginning of a quantitative test, or are in a minority when they take the test, or have just watched a commercial in which women were behaving like airheads, or when they have just tried on a swimsuit as opposed to a sweater, then they perform less well than comparable women perform on the same test in more neutral conditions. (Such things do not affect men, because highlighting their gender does not trigger negative associations about mathematical ability).

Confidence is not a stable trait, particularly when you are growing up. Though the ways psychologists measure confidence has improved over the past few decades, relying less on brazen self-illusion (“I’m good at maths”) to include self-efficacy (“I have to put in a lot of effort to be good at maths”), measuring the confidence of a person is tricky when confidence is so dependent on context, and context is so noisy.

Sometimes a brilliant girl will say really awful, heart-sinking things, such as, “You need a male brain to do maths”* but we need to record, too, their frequent acts of creative resistance where we can see the real meaning of confidence.

I offer this blog to anyone who remains as riled as I by Michael Mosley’s acceptance of Simon Baron-Cohen’s carefully paired claim that, “The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems,” and, “The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy.”

The first evidence cluster is derived from animal behaviour. For example, male great apes engage in more play fighting than female great apes, and female great apes show more interest in babies; male rats find their way through mazes more quickly than do female rats – though higher levels of testosterone improve female rats’ ability to find their way through a maze. But hormones constitute software not hardware; they are an environmental influence.

Evidence from animal behaviour is attractive to those claiming “hard wired” differences because animals are outside human culture. But how are they then relevant to human behaviour? Melissa Hines’ observations on toy preferences among monkeys are fascinating and delightful, but give us no idea about these preferences mean to the monkey mind. The leap (which Hines herself does not make) to a systematizing/empathizing distinction is again difficult, since animals do not in any obvious way understand or build systems.

A key argument rests on a study of one-day-old infants showing that male babies were more likely to focus longer on a mechanical mobile, and female babies were more likely to focus longer on a human face. The persistence with which Baron-Cohen argues that empathy is distinct from systematizing is remarkable, and leads him to strange places, where boys, in visual search tasks administered by psychologists, are better at noticing detail, but where girls, less quick to notice detail and change, are somehow better at reading changes in mood and emotion in faces. But reproducing this study is tricky, partly because it is very difficult to track the very short attention span of a one day old infant.

Evolutionary arguments used to support the propositions that “the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy” and “the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems,” bring us back to the human arena. In hunter-gatherer societies, system focus allowed men to test the effectiveness of arrows, and to understand weather and season systems. Spending long periods of time alone, they could skimp on empathy development. Women, on the other hand, stayed together, made friends, had children, gossiped and were good at reading the feelings of their mates so they could be good partners to their men.

In women’s daily work as gatherers, they used implements for digging, weaving, cooking. Are these lesser tools than those used in the hunt? Weather systems and seasonal systems would be as important for the gatherers as for the hunters; and if women were good at gossiping, then they were good at understanding and tracking social systems. Repeatedly, those who argue brain differences strip away structure from things women do and pack structure into accounts of what men do. However, if the emotionally-challenged Rob in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity exhibits typical male systematising in his classification of musical tapes, then what is the (stereo)typical female Cher doing in the film Clueless when she sets up computerised classifications of her clothes by style, colour and co-ordinates?

And what happens to the cognitive element in empathizing when it is said to be hard-wired in the female brain? Empathizing skills include not only sympathy for others; they also include understanding that gives the power to manipulate and plot. Where is the evidence for female empathy as soft and shapeless feeling? A common argument comes from girls’ and boys’ play and conversations. It is said that 99% of girls play with dolls at age six, compared with just 17% of boys, and, it is said, doll playing is the opposite of rule-based activity. But close observation of girls’ play reveals a deep and subtle rule book, and their gossip weaves and disrupts highly complex social systems.

Empathy involves high levels of attention to detail and assimilation of different contexts and systems. Someone skilled in empathy does far more than label a facial movement as a smile or a frown. Analysing a smile as false or genuine, for example, involves the ability to recognise something as a smile, and then to note minute differences in the muscle work on the face. If boys perform better on visual search tasks administered in psychological studies, and girls are quicker to note changes in the human facial map, then the visual search tasks administered in psychological studies should be reassessed.

We can see a more imaginative and coherent model in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Mr Ramsay – socially awkward, emotionally isolated, stuck on facts and linear thinking (he models philosophical thought as an alphabetical progression) – lives in complementary contrast with Mrs Ramsay who “knew [her son’s feelings] without having learnt”; but Woolf shows that “knowledge without having learnt” is derived from observation of minute detail and access to multiple contexts. She is the archetypal empathiser because she is adept at understanding complex systems.

The in-laws we acquire can affect our quality of life, from long-term happiness to family life. In “What Do You Want From Me?: Learning How to Get Along With In-Laws,” author and psychologist Terri Apter offers advice on how to ease tension and build healthy relationships with your spouse’s family. Here is an excerpt from chapter 4.

Chapter 4: Why Is It So Hard on the Women?

Ideals and Competition During 20 years of research on families, I have observed in-laws who love one another, and in-laws who show immense appreciation for what each brings to the family. I have seen in-laws who demonstrate sympathy and stamina for each other’s quirks and demands. I have heard about in-laws who are a source of joy and support. In a myriad of ways, in-law relationships can be filled with love, warmth, and tolerance.

I have also found that any in-law relationship can be difficult in the ways that, for many reasons, only in-law relationships can be — jam-packed with tensions over matters that seem tiny, marked by long-term grudges over passing comments, and triggered by one careless comment or sin of omission. Whether it is a parent-in-law, child-in-law, or sibling-in-law, in-law relationships have their special potential for conflict. But I have also observed that the most heated and persistent problems arise between two women — the wife and the husband’s mother. While 15 percent of mother-in-law/son-in-law relationships have some tension, 60 percent of mother-in-law/daughter-in-law bonds are described by some strong negative term, such as “strained,” “uncomfortable,” “infuriating,” “depressing,” “draining,” “simply awful.”

The intractable problems between the two women in-laws — the wife and the husband’s mother — arise from their similar positions: Each is the primary woman in her primary family. As each tries to establish or protect her status, each feels threatened by the other. “What will I have to relinquish if I respect your position in the family?” and “Will I retain my importance if I acknowledge yours?” signal a vulnerability that can lead to competition over emotive issues about who has more power and more influence in the domestic sphere.

Vulnerability can make apparently minor in-law conflicts feel like storms in the center of our lives. Concern about power and influence, and about the enduring nature of love, is often acted out between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in the context of female roles, particularly that of “good wife,” “good mother,” and, more generally, “good woman.” These roles generate questions that emerge in the pressure cooker of family life, questions that we answer, only to find that our long-sought answers require further amendments and refinements. Contact and conflict with our in-laws press upon sore points of doubt and regret, and many women find themselves enacting global battles between cultural ideals and personal realities on their own domestic turf.

The Domestic WatchMost of the time, most of the women who collaborated with me in these studies assured me that they had little patience with the ideals that may have dominated the lives of women during the middle part of the last century. The mystique of the perfect mother and the ideal wife, for both mothers-in-law and -daughters-in-law, signals ideals they are likely to relegate to time past. Nevertheless, these so-called defunct ideals became live issues between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Sammi, Tim, and Marge: The Emotional Issue of Housework Sammi, at the age of thirty-four, is normally comfortable with her domestic lifestyle, but a visit from her mother-in-law, Marge, injects her with self-doubt:

I try to play it cool, and say to myself, “She can just take me as I am.” But as soon as Marge steps through the door I start seeing things that ordinarily don’t bother me one bit. The homey feel in the living room suddenly looks like a train wreck. Marge is never outright critical, but last time she came she took one sorrowful look around the place and said, “You must be awfully busy at work.” I damn near choked on that. What was she doing? Offering me some excuse for the messy house?

I know how important it all is to her. Neat as a pin, she keeps her home. She’s always rushing around, muttering to herself as she cleans up. “Let me save you a job,” she says, and she picks Tim’s clothes out of the dryer and starts folding and smoothing them. Day one, I keep my mouth shut. But day four of her visit, I tell her, “Marge, it’s Tim’s job to iron his own shirts, so you’re not saving me a job, you’re saving Tim a job, and I hope he thanks you.” I never know if she gets it, or if just one more thing has flown out of my mouth to put her in a sulk. Sure, I should follow Tim’s advice and not let it get to me; but that’s easier said than done. She presses on all those sore spots. When she’s around, I catch myself worrying: Is my home downright unwholesome? Am I ruining my kid’s life with this environment? Shouldn’t — you know — shouldn’t the sheets be smooth and straight? Marge doesn’t have to say much to work my mind to that drill.

Like many women I interviewed, Sammi describes a spike in self-doubt in her mother-in-law’s presence. Though Marge denies that she is in any way critical of Sammi, she also says, “Everybody wants a clean and orderly home. When I visit I like to make myself useful, so I help her with that. I know that’s what Tim wants, too, and it’s better for the baby.”

Marge is not alone in her assumptions. A survey of one thousand women showed that 80 percent believed that the standard of cleanliness in a home was an important issue in whether or not they could warm to a daughter-in-law. In some cases this may register simple generational differences. Younger and older women may have very different ideas about what a woman is supposed to do. Someone who believes that you should have a dust-free house, a spotless kitchen, and children who look nice and neat because you’ve washed their clothes will not understand someone who thinks that her career is crucial to who she is, while housework is, to her, just a chore.

But the value a mother-in-law may place on a clean home, or her assumption that the responsibility for household cleanliness is her daughter-in-law’s, does not fully explain responses like those of Sammi — responses that are common, that deeply affect the daughter-in-law’s contentment, not only with her mother-in-law but also with her husband, and with herself.

Unwelcome Mental Inhabitants: The Over-Eye Mother-in-law/daughter-in-law conflict often emerges from an expectation that each is criticizing or undermining the other. As a daughter-in-law, you may believe that your mother-in-law’s domestic routines set a standard that you think she expects you to follow. As a mother-in-law, you may think that your daughter-in-law’s lifestyle implies criticism of your own values and achievements. This mutual unease may have less to do with actual attitudes, and far more to do with persistent female norms that few of us manage to shake off completely.

In her work with women and depression, Dana Crowley Jack identified an internal, nagging observer, and named it the Over-Eye. Social norms are internalized, so that even when we resist them, they may get in our way. For example, the norm that housework is the job of a (good) wife, and that a good home must operate as a clean and neat home, can be activated and make you feel deficient, even when the more conscious and determined part of your mind rejects those assumptions. Cultural associations stick, even when you personally do not endorse them. That is why housework can be so emotionally laden: Who does it well may be a sign of who is caring and loving.

Why Can’t You Just Ignore This? “Why do you let this bother you?” Tim demands. “You have so much going for you. There’s no reason to feel she’s putting you down. That’s just how she is. Just let it go.”

Tim reminds Sammi that there are things about her parents that bother him, and he just ignores them: Why can’t Sammi do the same with his mother?

Ignoring comments is not an option for women dealing with their in-laws. Women rarely have the knack of switching off their antennae. In-law visits take place within the home, and the home is a testing ground for still-powerful questions about women’s roles and the symbolic value of domestic acts. Whether it’s remembering a nephew’s birthday or pouring the milk into a jug before setting it on the table, small, apparently insignificant gestures can take on meaning, or become points over which meaning is teased out. When women of different families become, in law, one family, each can trigger the other’s dormant anxieties about norms within the home.

Carol, Gillian, and Paul: Praise as Control Reminders of female domestic norms can ignite anger that may seem inexplicable and irrational to others. Carol, forty-three, feels threatened by her mother-in-law’s praise. “You’ve done a lovely job on this kitchen. My, those curtains are adorable” and “That pot roast was something else. You just have to tell me how you do it,” Carol mimics her mother-in-law, Gillian, and sighs. “And the next thing I know Gillian’s talking about her other daughter-in-law, how wonderful she is, how she’s done these marvelous things with her children or her house, or how she gave her a super-duper present or said something really nice to her. My husband says that she’s just talking, just giving us the family news, just trying to be nice. But you can’t convince me it’s ‘just’ that.”

Gillian cannot fathom the source of her daughter-in-law’s unease. “That woman is ornery,” she tells me. “You never know how she’s going to jump. No way of knowing what’s going to calm her down and what’s going to wind her up.”

Carol feels criticized when her mother-in-law praises her, because she thinks Gillian’s “praise” marks out a hierarchy of values and her own low score on that value system. Gillian is unaware of this possible interpretation, and is unable to crack the code of her daughter-in-law’s responses.

“You Raised Him Like This”: It’s Easier to Blame His Mother Husbands are under pressure to change — to put more time into running the home and caring for their children, to revise their expectations of a wife’s role both within the home and at work, to learn new ways of sharing and connecting. Some men have to unlearn patterns they learned from their parents’ allocation of domestic work. Some women, as daughters-in-law, blame their husband’s mother for their partner’s resistance to change; and some women, as mothers-in-law, feel that a daughter-in-law’s complaints about a son’s behavior denigrate the domestic habits they themselves value.

At the same time, many mothers-in-law insist that they have done their best to raise sons to be new men, that they have encouraged their son to respect women’s careers and to take on a fair share of domestic tasks. They are confounded by a daughter-in-law’s view that they have failed.

Lisa, Andrew, and Pam: Battling Expectations Lisa, age forty-one, has been married to Andrew for six years. She complains that even though her career achievements equal those of her partner on every objective measure, her mother-in-law sees Andrew’s merits in bolder colors, and her role as supportive and subordinate:

I’m at the same corporate level as my husband. We get the same salary. Yet she’s always going on about his work, his career. It drives me crazy. And there’s always this meta-message: “His career is more important than yours, and you should put him first.”

One consequence of Pam’s bias is, Lisa believes, “every visit from his mother sets Andrew back at least a year in my battle to make him carry his weight at home. He asks, ‘Where’s the butter?’ and his mother jumps up and puts it down in front of him. She doesn’t see I’m trying to downsize his expectations of domestic service.”

Pam is hurt that Lisa devalues the roles she takes pride in. “It took me a long time to figure out what her beef was. She’d hit the ceiling for the smallest little thing. I couldn’t figure it out. But now I see. Now I get it. She doesn’t think I should do what I’ve been doing for forty years. She wants to tell me how to treat my own family. She can’t stand it that I put myself out for the people in my family. Well, what can I do about that? Where can we go from here? I was a good enough mother to raise a son she wants to marry. I’m not going to change for her say-so.”

In the center of this storm is Andrew, who is guilty if he accepts his mother’s service, and guilty if he resists it. Using a common psychological trick called scapegoating, Lisa bypasses her husband, and blames her mother-in-law for her husband’s behavior.

In some cases, it is easier to resent a mother-in-law for “spoiling” her son than it is to resent a husband for failing to do his share of domestic chores. Battles about who does what can have a devastating, cumulative effect on a marriage. When Arlie Russell Hochschild studied couples who began married life determined to share household tasks and child care equally she discovered that many wives gave up the struggle for the sake of marital harmony. When a wife does not feel that her husband is doing a fair share, she may seek to preserve marital harmony, and moderate her own anger with her spouse, by blaming her mother-in-law.

Maternal Conservatism When I began my second study of in-laws in 1999, and my third study in 2004, I expected that the generational divide I had first noticed twenty years before would have been bridged. Certainly, women I interviewed as mothers-in-law saw themselves as sharing a cultural shift with their daughters-in-law. They experienced the same pressure to juggle work and family. They shared high expectations of their own achievements across many aspects of their lives. These mothers-in-law were women born in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s; they themselves worked hard to create an equal partnership with their husbands. So, it was a surprise to hear Angie, age fifty-two, say that she hoped her daughter-in-law would lose her bid for a seat in Congress because her children saw little enough of her anyway. Angie explains her position:

I know from my own experience how important it is to have your own career, and develop your skills. I worked pretty much all through the time I had my children, and I’m still working now. But looking at Steph’s drive — well, there’s a limit. My son Ian has to be home by 5:30 every evening to take over from the babysitter. He’s the sole parent on weekends. He’s not always in good health, with the burdens he has al-ready. The youngest child is a real handful. I’m sure this acting out is because he doesn’t see enough of his mother. Can you imagine how things would be for him if Steph’s elected to Congress? I admire her. I really do. But there’s a limit to what she should ask of Ian and the children.

While general views on women’s roles have changed, in the role of mother and mother-in-law, a woman’s perspective may be in a time warp.

A mother wants what’s best for her son. Doing his fair share of family work is not necessarily best for him. A mother remains focused primarily on the son’s interests, and those interests, in our society, involve a good career, a well-run home, and leisure time. A good career depends on long hours at work; contented children and a well-run home involve constant time and attention. A woman also wants what’s best for her grandchildren, and a mother at home is the most simple way — if not necessarily the best and only way — of meeting children’s needs. So wherever she is intellectually, a mother-in-law’s heart may well lie with a 1950s model of a daughter-in-law.

Most mothers-in-law protest that they do not set domestic ideals for a daughter-in-law, and do not expect her to fulfil the traditional model of “wife.” Many say in all sincerity that they are keen to raise sons to be new men who are as responsive to children and as domestically responsible as their partners. Yet, on a deeper level, they may want a daughter-in-law who puts her husband first.

Mothers of both sons and daughters see their own child as of supreme importance. Each mother wants her own child to thrive, and each mother-in-law has a bias towards the well-being of her own son or daughter, who will always “come first” with her. But when that child is someone’s husband, a mother’s perspective may also be shaped by the privileged status he’s likely to borrow from the remnants of the wider culture (such as the assumption that the man’s career comes first). A daughter-in-law has to fight to ensure that her career goals receive equal respect. When these goals are undermined by someone within her own family, she redoubles her efforts to defend them.

Many of the familiar complaints about mothers-in-law are powered by the fragility of women’s gains in the public world. They erupt from hypersensitivity to conservative messages about roles in the family. In this context, even a throwaway message that a husband’s career and comforts have priority may set off fireworks.

Women dread taking on the mantle of the mother-in-law, with all the accompanying clichés, and they work hard to establish new images and roles. Yet nothing teaches us more about the precarious truce in the war between the sexes than this uneasy relationship between two women. And this clash continues to present a conservative force in family life. When a daughter-in-law expects female support and friendship from a mother-in-law, she feels betrayed by the mother whose son comes first.

Any treaty between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law will depend upon a woman, when she becomes a mother-in-law, taking a broader view of her son’s best interests. It will depend upon a woman’s skill, as she becomes a wife, to teach both her husband and his mother how to read new scripts of equality.

Role Ambivalence Does Not Prevent Role Competition There is a further twist to those in-law tensions that spring from domestic roles. Even though many daughters-in-law want to revise male and female roles within the home, they compete with their mothers-in-law to fulfil these roles — as wife and mother, as housewife and kin keeper. They want to prove that they fill these roles as well as, perhaps even better than, their mother-in-law.

Role competition arises on many fronts. The most obvious involves status. A daughter-in-law is an adult in her own household and, as such, is equal to any woman in the family. But a mother-in-law’s maternal expertise is well established, and she may expect deference from a daughter-in-law. There then arises that tricky question about who is “mother” in the family, with final say over all those things that women — for all the change there has been — still assume charge over: housework and child care, mealtimes and children’s manners.

Sammi complains that her mother-in-law takes over these roles as soon as she enters the home: “She takes charge of the kids. She bustles around, telling them what to do, telling them how to do the things I help them with every day. ‘This is how you brush your teeth’ and ‘This the best way to wash your face’ and ‘This is how you should look every day before you leave the house.’ I have to get myself out of the room quick, otherwise I’ll scream.”

Carol feels that the running commentary of praise she gets from her mother-in-law sets Gillian up as her judge. “She praises me because she knows better — as though I want her approval. It’s a way of lording her status over me.” So Gillian’s attempt to be a “good mother-in-law” and express her approval of Carol is seen by Carol as a bid for status. Competition between two mothers of different generations makes each uneasy, but for different reasons. Carol and Sammi press up against their own lingering ambivalence surrounding their choices, and their own hovering concern that, in breaking with traditional female roles, they may be harming their husband or children. Marge and Gillian feel their daughter-in-laws’ resistance as disrespect to them, as undermining their value as the mother in their family.

Women Notice the Tension More For centuries, women have had special incentives for “reading minds” and monitoring the flow of human interaction around them. Some psychologists argue that this skill arises from women’s traditionally subservient position: dependence on others’ goodwill and approval has heightened their sensitivity to others’ responses. Some psychologists argue that this skill is demonstrated from birth, and that women’s natural-born empathy facilitates the roles they have played throughout human -history.

Day to day, girls and women spend more time reflecting on what has been said by whom, and on considering the implications of verbal acts, than do boys or men, in general. The kitchen-size exchanges that so often form the fabric of in-law complaints have an exquisite clarity to women, but many men simply do not notice them.

Women tend to be more observant of the myriad of minute expressions of feeling that constitute every inter-personal exchange. When someone is uncomfortable in their presence, or when someone dislikes them, or dislikes someone they care for, women are more likely than men to pick up on this. They set high standards for interpersonal relationships, particularly within the family. They are quicker to step in to soothe a distressed child, to intervene in a sibling quarrel, or to pick up on the indicators of stress or sadness that a teenager might try to hide. Women are also more likely than men to instigate divorce, even though they are also likely to suffer greater financial disadvantage in consequence; the higher standards they set for a good marriage make them willing to risk more by ending an unsatisfying marriage. With their friends, girls and women worry over the quality of their relationships, and brood far longer on the causes of the quarrels, replaying and revising accounts of how a quarrel arose, who said what, who was at fault, and how the quarrel can be remedied.

The special attention women give to interpersonal domestic politics—a skill sometimes referred to as “women’s intuition” — is often focused on maintaining harmony and meeting others’ needs; but, in the realm of in-laws, this sensitivity promotes hostility as often as it promotes harmony. As women describe uncomfortable interchanges with a mother-in-law, they often describe public acts of rudeness and criticism to which the men in the family are oblivious.

Women Have Special Skills for This Kind of Battle In describing the overall context of in-law unease, we can see why the power of in-laws affects women more than men. The heated issues that arise within the domestic setting, their high expectations for domestic harmony, their ambivalence about work and family balance, their sensitivity to status in the home are sufficient to explain the special impact these tensions have on women; but the tactics so often used in these battles also heighten the discomfort.

The tactics used in many in-law battles have much in common with squabbles on the school ground. Though enacted in a different setting, the tactics are reminiscent of those used in girls’ cliques. These schoolgirl cliques are in many ways like kinship networks. The distinctive dynamics of girlhood friendships allow strong alliances to be formed. Girls, in their friendship groups, have high expectations of mutual affection and admiration. These alliances offer support and comfort and protection, but girls constantly negotiate and renegotiate boundaries between insiders and outsiders in the group, just as in-laws do.

Girls engage in borderwork, or an exploration of who is “in” and who is “out,” who is similar and who is different, with a mix of apparent friendliness and relentless criticism. Much of this criticism consists of gossip, or behind-the-back reports that impugn another girl’s motives, character, and behavior in a setting she cannot challenge. Girls also use indirect criticism and innuendo as opportunistic weapons, and they battle over who is “nicer” and who is most popular, or admired, or liked.

The tactics used to exclude and criticize are rarely mentioned by boys in their friendship groups, but they cause girls enormous pain during those friendship wars of junior high school. When the tactics are replayed during in-law battles, they awaken awful memories. Past experience makes women both more skilled in these battles and more uncomfortable with them. While the long-term, low-key, indirect attacks go unnoticed by others, the weapon of disguised, indirect criticism puts daughter-in-law and mother-in-law in the arena of the mean girls they hoped they had long ago left behind.